Bread and Stone

by Allan Weiss

350 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2024

Reviews

[Rachel Ashera Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

At last, a novel about the Winnipeg General Strike! Idealistic young William enlists to fight in WWI over the wishes of his coal miner father and deeply religious mother, driven by a search for brotherhood and meaning. He returns to a vastly changed Canada—his mother has died in the influenza pandemic, there are no jobs to be had, and the country is eager to forget the men who marched off to war ostensibly to defend it. Disillusioned but not down, William is drawn into the labour movement by an army buddy and the conflicts not just between workers and bosses but movement leaders and the rank-and-file.

I cannot get over how well-researched this is. If you want every detail of every conflict and decision made, every action taken, every tension between various interests, this is the book for you. The author has done his homework and this is honestly better than any non-fiction I've read on the subject.

[Michael Martineck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allen Weiss’s (I love using three Ss) Bread and Stone is, just as the title suggests, nourishing and hard. It follows a young man, William McLean, from a farm in Alberta, through World War I, into the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. The detail, the richness, the immersion in the times and places, is so complete and authentic that it is difficult to believe Weiss wasn’t present. (He is, as they might say in 1919, no spring chicken, but he’s not 120 either.) The book fills you with facts, but this is no textbook. The story moves at a wonderful pace, giving the reader, in William, a heroic entry point and reason to keep reading. It feeds you what you need to know, when you need to know it, creating the kind of full three-course meal I crave in fiction: entertainment, enlightenment, edification.
Any book that can pull that off is worth your time.

Not that it’s easy. While the story is smooth, the realness is tough to swallow. Alberta at the turn of the last century was a difficult place to live. The section of the book in which William is fighting overseas is necessarily challenging; no-man’s land was also as the title suggests. The final section, in which ex-soldiers must return from a fight to fight some more, is heartbreaking.

And ultimately nutritious. I knew nothing about the general strikes that ran across Canada a century ago. I can’t speak for others, but I think if the world – not just Canadians – remembered the events, collective bargaining in first world counties would not have fallen by half in the last 60 years. The trenches of the middle class were dug and held with bone and blood.

Hard truths and food for thought.

[Kathryn Grimbly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific read. Gives life to a part of Canadian history that I really knew nothing about. I very much enjoyed Weiss' writing style. That he presented the story through the mind / eyes of William, which showed us how all of his experiences affected his humanity. To see him move from naïve optimism to wariness and then to despair was an interesting – and ultimately very frustrating - trajectory. Turning away from the church (more or less). But it is real life. Such a depressing ending, but maybe with some hopefulness later on. Having gone through the war, and then the battle for the unions, just to end up no further ahead. I also liked very much that he was such a principled character and was really trying very hard to do ‘right’ by his fellow man. Underscore man, of course, since he still was struggling with equality for women. I loved all the details. I always like details in a story. The warm and not so great salmon sandwiches, William’s reluctance to start smoking, his concern for his comrades in arms, all the details about the trenches of course. So disheartening to think these people were just trying to make a decent living and the ‘powers that be’ think it is okay to use horses to break up their parades and shoot at them. Despicable. After I finished the book, I went online to read up a bit on the strikes and what happened afterwards. At least, I was heartened to see that ultimately it led to the formation of the unions and eventually, the CCF/NDP and so on. Congratulations to the author. Highly recommend.